


got a secret (i can't tell)

by darkangel0410



Category: Addams Family - All Media Types, Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Background Relationships, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, I'm not sure how to tag this, Keith Yandle/Kevin Hayes - Freeform, M/M, Pre-Slash, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-17
Updated: 2019-05-17
Packaged: 2020-03-07 01:37:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18863089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkangel0410/pseuds/darkangel0410
Summary: The Tkachuk family tree is made of hockey sticks and coffins.





	got a secret (i can't tell)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry, but sometimes you look at two hockey players and their extended family and tell yourself that they're 100% Addams and here we are. Enjoy!
> 
> There's some stuff I wasn't sure how to tag for in the end notes.

Hockey is relatively new in their family: they have cousins that play and uncles and Matt thinks possibly third and fourth cousins, but when taken in with the rest of their long family history, well. It's almost in its infancy still.

It's a hit, though, and almost everyone plays at least a little bit. As long as one of the Hayes are around there's always ice to play on and even the older adults get a kick out of all the inherent violence in the game; they love the idea of fighting for honor, to win, just for the fun of it. 

Addams’ aren't necessarily _violent_ but they have a rough idea of fun and play, and even if attacking each other out of the blue tapers off as they get older, it doesn't take much for adult Addams’ to square off and even less for the fight to turn into something that would maim other people. 

Afterward, there's usually a hug and a laugh, compliments on a fight well fought. Addams’ might do a lot of things, but they never hold a grudge. Especially amongst themselves.

Hockey appeals to them for a lot of reasons.

*

The first time they're on any kind of ice Matt's four and Brady's three.

It's not really a planned outing.

Their dad's on the road and their mom's busy with Taryn, who's two and so delighted with being shocked that she keeps overloading the breakers by sticking keys and forks and everything else she can get a hold of into the outlets in the living room.

By the time their mom realizes she hasn't seen or heard from them in over an hour, they're already out in the backyard and sliding around on the small rink their dad made.

They end up staying out there all afternoon and well into the evening, alternating between chasing each other over the ice and fighting over who it belongs to.

After that, it's almost impossible to keep them in the house during the winter.

*

They spend a lot of time going between the Addams estate and their house when they’re still really young; it’s hard to remember what they can and can’t do when they’re around ordinary people, so every few days their mom will bring them to visit Aunt Morticia and Uncle Gomez and it’s relaxing to be able to ask for arsenic on their cookies and nightshade syrup on their ice cream, to be able to chase after their cousins and not have to worry about the wrong person seeing them when it inevitably leads to someone being stabbed.

Uncle Gomez lets them play with his train set sometimes and teaches them how to fence, how to curse in French and laughs at how terrible their accents are. “Don’t worry, boys, you have plenty of time to perfect a lot of things,” he tells them with another laugh and sends them off to play outside.

Taryn spends a lot of time trailing after Wednesday, who’s been her favorite person since she was a baby and Wednesday used to put her in the fish tank to play with the electric eels. It gives their mom free time so she can relax in the garden with Aunt Morticia or bake something with Grandmama.

When Uncle Fester is around, he brings them out to the swamp and shows them the best way to hide in quicksand, how to track someone through water and where the best alligators are; when Taryn comes back to the house with a nestful of baby alligators following her like ducklings, he helps Taryn convince their mom to let her keep them.

There's always family coming and going from there, cousins and aunts and uncles, some of them distantly related, but they were all Addams. And that's really all that mattered.

*

Finding an unchaperoned human wandering around the Addams estate doesn't happen very often and it's even stranger when said human isn’t scarred, in some fashion, by the experience.

They find someone one night when Matt's nine and Brady's eight and they're running around playing a halfhearted game of headhunters while they're waiting for Uncle Gomez to finish setting up the scavenger hunt. 

"Who are you?" Matt asks, confusion making him wrinkle his nose; he takes a couple of steps closer, everything else completely forgotten in the face of this new mystery. He's vaguely aware of Brady and Pugsley coming up behind him and all the other kids drawing closer.

The stranger takes a step backward and swallows nervously, clearly taken aback by the sight of a large group of children covered in animal blood and some of them missing body parts.

There's nothing about him that speaks to Matt, no undercutting thrum to his blood that would mark him as an Addams: his blood is quiet, docile; normal in a way Matt didn't have a lot of experience with.

"You're _ordinary_ ," Matt goes on, his voice tipping over from confusion to delight. He draws closer to the stranger, a sharp kind of hunger in his eyes, like a predator closing in on it's prey. "Why are you here? Ordinary people never come this far in.

"I wonder..." Matt trails off as he tilts his head to the side and studies the person in front of him, curiosity replacing the delight on his face. His fingers twitch a little of their own accord, eager to take apart this surprise visitor in front of them.

"Do you want me to get him for you?" Brady asks and he's already half a step in front of Matt before he's done asking the question, anticipating Matt's answer. 

"Back off guys, he's mine," Kevin tells them firmly, appearing at the stranger’s side out of almost nowhere; he wraps his hand around the guy's neck and fixes them with a steely look. "He's _mine_ ," Kevin repeats, extra meaning layered over the words, "don't touch him, got it?"

"Oh, ok," Matt says with a shrug, easily switching his attention off the human at Kevin's words. "You just had to say something, Kev, I wouldn't do anything to your stuff."

"Yeah, I know," Kevin smiles and ruffles Matt's hair, laughs a little when Matt bites his hand in retaliation before he can pull it back. "Go scram, I think Uncle Gomez is burying the treasure chest over by the swamp."

They all take off at that, wanting to get a sneak peek at this year's prize for the scavenger hunt, completely forgetting about the human with Kevin in their eagerness. 

It's a long time before any of them see him again.

*

When Matt's eleven Thing pulls him from a game of hide and die because Aunt Morticia wants him; Matt drags his feet because his team was _winning_ but he follows Thing back inside obediently. 

They go through the back door, the kitchen and then go left to head to the lower part of the house; Matt perks up when they go through the secret passage in the billiard room: the one that leads into the basement instead of up to the library. 

The passage is decorated with spiderwebs and some rats are napping in a corner; Matt pauses long enough to gently pet one of the tarantulas on the walls and rolls his eyes when Thing impatiently taps it's fingers on the ground.

It eventually opens up into a cozy workroom, a fire cheerfully burning in the massive fireplace with a covered cauldron in the middle; there's books piled haphazardly everywhere, along with herbs and flowers strewn around.

Aunt Morticia and Grandmama are sitting across from each other, some books and bowls scattered in between them. Matt waits patiently for them to acknowledge him, content to look around the room.

“Thank you, Thing," Aunt Morticia says, smiling when Thing waves and hurries off back the way they came. "Hello, Matthew,” she adds as she gets up from the table; she walks over and messes Matt's hair before ushering him over to the table. “Thank you for coming, dear, it's a beautiful night so I won't keep you cooped up inside for too long.”

“It's no problem, Aunt Morticia,” Matt tells her and sits down in the seat she was in before.

He smells arsenic as soon as he sits, so he turns big eyes on Grandmama and looks up at her hopefully. 

“Just like your father,” she chuckles, but she gives him a couple of sugar cookies with arsenic sprinkled on top with a smile. “Got a nose for sweets, don't you, lad?”

Matt makes a happy noise, his mouth full of cookies.

Grandmama waits until he's done eating before she speaks again. “Well, dearie, we were doing some work and we thought you might be able to help us.”

“I'll try,” Matt says doubtfully, not sure what he could possibly help them with.

“It's not going to take long,” Grandmama reassures him with another smile, “I did this same work when I was around your age and so did Morticia. As well as your great-aunt Kalpernica and your cousin Mal. Jimmy and Ryan also have some of the talent. And Wednesday, of course.”

“Wednesday was a little bit precocious,” Aunt Morticia adds with not a little pride. “She was quite a bit younger than you the first time she came in here. But you shouldn't judge yourself by her, Matthew, you have your own talents and your own way to go, and Wednesday has always been ahead of things.”

Matt nods, even though he didn't fully understand what was being said he grasps the part about Wednesday; she excels at almost everything she tries, except maybe pretending to be ordinary, so Matt has no trouble believing that she was better than anyone else at whatever was going on in here.

“Now, I just need you to look at this and tell me whose blood it is, dearie,” Grandmama goes on and pushes one of the small bowls on the table closer to him; he focused on it with only mild curiosity, any Addams that was put off by the sight of blood wasn't worth their weight in gold, and Matt might not be Wednesday, but he _was_ an Addams down to his toes.

“Pugsley,” Matt says after a few seconds of staring at the blood; the light shimmered along the surface of it, making it sparkle briefly before being absorbed by it.

“Correct,” Grandmama says and writes something down on a piece of paper before she speaks again. “Can you tell me how you knew it was him, Matthew?”

“I dunno,” Matt shrugs, not sure how to explain the way the blood seemed strangely sweet, the way Pugsley was with his family and pets, but protective, too, in a way that didn't bode well for strangers. He doesn't have the words to tell them any of that or the way he can feel it in his bones when someone's an Addams, so he just shrugs again and says, "I can just tell."

Grandmama makes an interested noise and exchanges a look Matt can’t read with Aunt Morticia and then nudges another small bowl towards him. “And this one?”

“Kevin,” Matt tells them, immediately picking up the coldness clinging to this blood; it moves around the bowl, frost slowly climbing up the sides while it sucked the cold out of the air around it. “Maybe Jimmy or Uncle Josh,” he adds after another second of deliberation. “But I think Kevin.”

“Very good,” Grandmama says approvingly, patting Matt’s hand affectionately. “You’re doing very well, Matthew.” 

“Only a couple more and then you can go play,” Aunt Morticia adds as she clears away the bowls on the table and moves them to one of the other tables before she places two new ones down in front of Matt.

“That’s Brady,” Matt says before Aunt Morticia finishes placing them on the table and points to the one closest to him. Even more than the others it speaks to Matt, demanding his attention in the same way Brady does in real life, too. Matt can’t explain even to himself how or why it’s so important to him, just that it pulls at his own blood in a way no other blood ever has. It pulses with life, in time with Matt's heartbeat, and makes Matt feel like he could understand everything it's trying to say if he just paid close enough attention to it. He would know Brady’s blood anywhere, even if it was with a million other Addams’.

They exchange another look, this one long enough that it makes Matt squirm in his chair, afraid that he was in trouble for something, but Grandmama just makes another note on the paper in front of her and Aunt Morticia moves the last bowl closer to Matt.

It’s just normal blood, quiet and still, but Matt takes another couple seconds to study it in case he was wrong. “It’s no one,” Matt tells them, then adds, “Not an Addams, maybe someone ordinary?”

Grandmama makes an approving noise and gives Matt some more cookies while she makes more notes and hands them over to Aunt Morticia, then leans back in her chair and studies Matt while she drinks some of her tea. “You get top marks, dearie, better than anyone else your age this time around. 

"Now the question is what do you want to do with it?"

Matt finishes eating the cookies, chewing thoughtfully while he tried to piece everything together; Grandmama clearly thought he could do something that most of his other cousins couldn't, but he didn't understand what it could be.

"You see, Matthew, all of us know at least a little blood magic," Aunt Morticia explains after a few seconds and motions with her hand to include the estate and the entire family. "It's one of the things that make us different from everyone else."

"It's why we don't always bleed, right?" Matt asks intuitively, connecting this new piece of information to an almost forgotten conversation with his parents when him and Brady started playing mites and then again when they started bantam earlier this year. "We have to tell our bodies to bleed and pretend to be hurt if we're by ordinary people and something happens," he adds and makes a face. He hates that part of playing hockey, it's the worst thing about it.

"That's exactly right," Aunt Morticia tells him approvingly, along with a sharp nod of agreement from Grandmama. "Now, for some of us, it goes beyond that simple control over our own blood and includes being able to tell things about people using their blood as a conduit. Among other things," she adds almost absently.

Matt thinks about that for a few seconds before he says, "Not everyone can tell who people are by their blood?"

"No," Grandmama confirms and places her cup of tea onto the table before she points to the bowls that are still there. "Even those who have enough talent to be able to tell if someone is an Addams can rarely do more than that."

“There’s almost no limit to what you could do,” Aunt Morticia says, her voice even more serious than usual. “But it has to be your choice, Matthew.”

“Can I wait until after hockey?” Matt asks hopefully; he wants to learn more, but it doesn’t seem as important to him as hockey right now. He knows at some point in the future, hockey won’t be an option anymore and if he _has_ to stop playing, Matt wants to have something else to do. 

“I don’t see the harm in waiting a couple decades,” Grandmama finally says after a drawn out silence; she looks Matt over again and nods to herself. “Just as long as you keep a weather eye on yourself and tell one of us if anything unusually strange happens.”

Matt promises just as the door crashes open and Brady comes running into the room, armed to the teeth with at least four knives that Matt could see, and with Uncle Gomez, Lurch, Ryan and Pugsley behind, also bristling with weapons.

In the ensuing chaos, Brady sneaks Matt out while Uncle Gomez grabs Aunt Morticia and starts waltzing around the room, kissing her arm and telling her they were here to rescue everyone from whichever bastard had them hostage.

Matt tells Brady that there was nothing he needed rescuing from, but it makes him happy to know Brady had come looking for him as soon as he had noticed Matt missing.

*

Matt gets the invite to play in Ann Arbor for the developmental program the year he turns fourteen; there's no question of him accepting, but it takes a few weeks to sort out who's going to Detroit with him.

At first, it's just going to be his dad, but Brady throws a fit and gets almost hysterical about being separated from Matt; it upsets Matt, too, because he doesn't want to have to choose between hockey and being with his brother, and the argument lasts for a week and a half.

The final straw is when their dad gets lost on his way back from the store and when he finally gets home three hours later, he looks more resigned than angry, and tells them, "We're all going with Matt, I'm not dealing with an angry city over something like this."

The resulting temper tantrum from Taryn when she finds out is even worse than Brady's and for three weeks they can't walk around the house without tripping over angry reptiles.

In the end Taryn goes to stay with Aunt Morticia and Uncle Gomez while the rest of them pack up the house and move to Michigan. 

Privately Matt thinks it's for the best: Taryn doesn't like pretending to be ordinary and having to act like everyone else would make her miserable and awful to be around. This way she has what makes her happy and so does everyone else.

*

Detroit isn’t the same as St Louis, even if on the surface it’s not that different. It feels meaner to Matt, less like it cares about them and more that it puts up with them because it has no other choice, and when he asks Brady about it, Brady agrees: St Louis loves them because they belong to it and Detroit tolerates them because it can’t own them.

Brady’s always been in tune with the places where they live, more than Matt or even their mom, and Matt’s learned to always trust Brady’s instincts about cities and towns.

But Detroit isn’t all bad, they have family there, cousins by the boatload and some second cousins, too; Addams tend to congregate in the same places: where there’s one, there’s bound to be ten more before long, so it’s not a surprise that when they get there and there’s a welcome party to greet them.

They paint the family words on the basement wall that afternoon, each of them taking a turn while music was playing in the backyard, haunting and familiar like a memory Matt only vaguely remembered.

Afterwards they go outside, adults catching up with each other while the kids start feeling each other out; they get rambunctious while the adults are drinking moonshine and talking, having hand races and playing murder, murder until the moon comes up and it’s time to eat. 

Matt falls asleep on a blanket that's spread out across the grass in their new backyard a little bit later, Brady curled up next to him and the comforting murmur of the family blood in his bones.

*

Matt clicks with a lot of the guys in Ann Arbor: he’s always been outgoing and likes being around people, even when it means pretending to be something he’s not. Most of the time he goes over to their house to hang out or out at the movies or wherever there’s a pick-up game. He knows how to deflect attention away from himself and his family, how to seem as ordinary as almost everyone around him.

If he didn’t, he never would have left St Louis in the first place.

*

Brady gets an invite a year and change after they move to Detroit and even though he was already in Ann Arbor now it feels like he _belongs_ here with Matt, like they were meant to do this together, too.

It makes Matt feel better, more grounded the rare times when he feels caged in and suffocated by pretending to be something he’s not so often.

It would be easy for the guys to chirp them about how close they are, but they don’t even bother and Matt doesn’t know why exactly, he guesses they don’t want to aggravate the biggest threats in the room, even if they don’t consciously realize that’s what they’re doing.

Neither one of them try to be tougher than anyone else on the team or call attention to themselves that way, but once in a while he’ll share a look with Brady -or not even a look, really, just sometimes he’ll be lacing his skates up or taping his sticks and he’ll just see everyone around him and think how most of their childhood games would kill the people around him, how easy it would be for him to murder someone if he ever wanted to, and he’ll happen to glance at Brady, and he knows Brady understands what he’s feeling.

They don’t ever do anything, of course, because they were raised better than that, but the knowledge is still there and Matt thinks that maybe humans understand that threat better than they give them credit for.

*

It’s almost four years of being in Ann Arbor before anyone actually goes inside their house and the fact that it’s Auston doesn’t surprise Matt, not really: they’re pretty close and Auston’s stubborn once he’s got his mind set on something.

Auston comes over after practice one day, smiles and says all the right things to Matt’s parents; Brady willfully ignores him, attention on his phone with a tenacity that Matt knows from experience won’t go away any time soon.

He kicks Brady playfully on his way past and snickers when Brady growls at him under his breath; Matt shrugs when Auston looks at him questioningly and says, “Siblings.” which seems to satisfy Auston’s curiosity.

“What's that?” Auston asks when they’re getting situated to play video games.

They're in the basement and Matt doesn't even have to look around to know what he's talking about. It's painted on the wall, in a mix of all their blood, even the Addams that weren't around right now. Aunt Morticia had given it them when they moved from St Louis to Ann Arbor, carefully sealed so it wouldn't accidentally leak. The Addams blood was kept in one of the many sub-basements in the family mansion, safe there until it was someone else's turn to watch over it.

Matt knows better than to say any of that to Auston: he's ordinary, even if he plays sick  
hockey, and Matt's old enough to understand what happens if the wrong person finds out about them.

“Is that Latin or some shit?” 

One of the promises Matt made to his parents before Auston came over was that he would act normal, not say or do anything too different, but Matt thinks answering this is probably ok.

“Yeah, ‘ _Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc_ ’,” Matt tells him, the Latin rolling easily off of his tongue. “It's the family words.”

“Huh,” Auston says, then, “cool paint.”

Matt makes a noise of agreement even though Auston's wrong: it's not paint, but it doesn't really look like normal blood, absorbing the light and reflecting it back. It pulses with life, a steady murmur Matt can feel in his bones. 

It looks as fresh as the day they painted it on and Matt knows it'll stay that way until they move out again. 

Brady comes downstairs then, jumping over the last few steps and landing on the basement floor with a loud thump. “Mom says we're going to order pizza in a few hours,” he announces and tosses a bag of chips at Auston. “Have a snack until then.”

“Sweet,” Auston says and opens the bag; he shoves a handful of chips in his mouth and doesn't look away from the loading screen.

Brady rolls his eyes, but doesn't say anything else, just hands off a couple of cookies to Matt; they're sweet and tangy, making his mouth tingle pleasantly: belladonna chocolate chip, his and Brady's favorite and Matt thought they finished them off last night.

Brady grins at him before he runs back up the stairs, his eyes glinting briefly in the dim light of the small landing by the door to the kitchen and then he’s gone, yelling to their mom that he wants pineapples on his pizza.

*

There’s a few minutes later on that night when Matt’s dropping Auston off at his own house, where it seems like Auston might want to kiss him; it passes after a few tense seconds and Auston seems fine when he punches Matt in the shoulder before he leaves the car, but it makes Matt fidgety on the way home for reasons he’s not really sure of.

He doesn’t want Auston like that, not as anything other than a friend; he’s fucked ordinary people before, guys and girls, and it was perfectly fine, Matt guesses, but he had to be something he wasn’t the whole time and it just wasn’t worth the effort for him.

*

 

Brady wakes him up cutting his chest open, going for his heart -at least Matt assumes that’s what he was doing since that's usually what Brady aims for when he's pissy about something; it's not a very good attempt, Matt wakes up almost right away, but he knows it's not always about getting what he wants with Brady, sometimes it's the fight that matters more.

They don’t need to sleep much, but of course, Brady would know when he actually dozed off.

Matt punches him the face, shoves Brady away from him so he can grab the knife out of his chest and stab Brady in the throat; it gets him in the adam's apple and it would have slowed almost anyone else down, but Brady just growls and rips the knife out, then tries to drive it into Matt's arm.

Matt twists out of the way, falling onto the floor, and then throws one of the shoes laying around his bed at Brady; it goes wide, sailing past Brady's head and hitting the far wall. 

Brady's eyes are glowing, easily tracking every move Matt's making in the dark and it's instinct for Matt to switch over to his own night vision. He dives at Matt and takes them both crashing into his desk chair; there’s an ominous cracking noise when it hits the wall and it’s followed by the thud of Matt’s head when Brady manages to pin him to the ground and straddles his waist, hands around Matt’s neck like it matters if Matt can breathe or not.

Matt tries to buck Brady off of him and when that doesn’t work he picks up a glass nearby and smashes it against Brady’s face; it cuts Brady’s face but he shakes his head in annoyance and by the time he’s done, his face is smooth again, and there’s glass scattered around them. 

Matt’s door opens again and the light spilling in from the hallways freezes both of them; Matt recovers first and elbows Brady in the jaw hard enough to knock him off of him finally. “Boys, if the neighbors call the cops because you two decided to make a racket, I’m going to skin you alive,” mom tells them, her exasperation as obvious as how serious she is. “I don’t care why you’re fighting,” she adds before either one of them can say anything. “Just stop it until a more reasonable hour.”

She closes the door and leaves them laying on the floor side-by-side, the silence now that they’re not doing anything is deafening. Now that they’ve stopped, it’s clear to Matt what’s wrong with Brady.

“Auston isn’t,” Matt hesitates, not sure he has a way to explain how he knew Auston wasn’t for him. “His blood is too quiet,” he finally says; it seems inadequate, only part of the reason why he didn’t want Auston like that, but Brady relaxes fractionally like he understands Matt even when Matt’s not sure what he’s trying to say.

Matt hears Brady's heart beating evenly, the same steady beat as always, his blood calling out to Matt, as beautiful and chilling as ever.

"I would never choose Auston over you," Matt adds softly, turns his head to look at Brady. "Not ever."

Brady glances at him and nods sharply; he doesn't say anything but he threads his fingers through Matt’s and they lay there until it’s time to start getting ready for school, content with each other’s company.

**Author's Note:**

> There's mentions of Brady and Matt's real life extended family in this, most notably Jimmy and Kevin Hayes, and Ryan, Casey, Jack and Scott Fitzgerald. 
> 
> Their sister Taryn appears, too, as well as their parents, and are there for about half the fic.
> 
> There's a lot of casual violence in this, to each other and their families, mostly because they don't really process pain the same way as "ordinary" people do, so it's seen as play to them.
> 
> The incest is between Brady and Matt and is 99% implied until the end. 
> 
> There's no smut in this, but it's rated mature because of the incest aspect.
> 
> I think that's all that's worth mentioning, ymmv of course.


End file.
